In today's fast-paced digital landscape, business logic is often a tangled web. It's scattered across wiki pages, buried in monolithic applications, or worse, exists only in the minds of a few key team members. This fragmentation leads to inconsistency, slow response times, and a painful disconnect between business requirements and technical implementation.
What if you could treat your core business processes with the same rigor and agility as your application code?
This is the promise of Business as Code (BaC), a revolutionary paradigm that treats your operational workflows as first-class citizens in your development lifecycle. It’s about defining, versioning, testing, and deploying your business logic just like any other piece of software. This post will explore what BaC means, why it’s a game-changer for modern operations, and how trigger.do provides the crucial activation layer to bring it all to life.
At its core, Business as Code is the practice of defining your company's operational processes in a clear, executable, and version-controlled format—code. Instead of relying on static flowcharts or rigid, black-box Business Process Management (BPM) tools, you write the logic for processes like customer onboarding, financial reconciliation, or content moderation in a language your team already knows.
This shift delivers transformative benefits:
But having your logic codified is only half the battle. How do you launch these workflows? How do you tell your new-user-onboarding process to run when a user actually signs up?
This is where event-driven triggers come in. An event is any meaningful occurrence in your systems—a user creating an account, a payment succeeding, a file being uploaded, or an anomaly detected by an AI model.
An event-driven architecture allows your systems to react instantly to these occurrences. The missing piece for many companies trying to implement Business as Code is a simple, reliable way to connect events to their coded logic.
This is precisely the problem trigger.do solves. We provide a simple API for API triggers that act as the central nervous system for your automated business. You can define your complex business logic once and use our powerful SDK to trigger it from anywhere.
It’s about moving from passive logic to active, automated workflows that run your business.
Let's make this concrete. Imagine you've defined a multi-step, agentic workflow for onboarding a new premium user. This workflow might:
With trigger.do, initiating this entire sequence is as simple as a single API call. From your application's backend, right after a new user signs up and pays, you'd add the following code:
import { Trigger } from "@trigger.dev/sdk";
const client = new Trigger({ id: "my-app", apiKey: process.env.TRIGGER_API_KEY });
// This Job will be triggered by an API call from your backend.
// It represents your "Business as Code" for user onboarding.
client.defineJob({
id: "new-user-onboarding",
name: "New User Onboarding Workflow",
version: "1.0.0",
trigger: client.onEvent({
name: "user.created",
}),
run: async (payload, io, ctx) => {
// 1. Send a personalized welcome email
await io.sendEmail("send-welcome-email", {
to: payload.email,
subject: `Welcome to the Premium Plan, ${payload.name}!`,
// ...email body
});
// 2. Add the user to a dedicated Slack channel
await io.slack.postMessage("post-to-slack", {
channel: "#new-premium-users",
text: `🎉 New premium user! Welcome ${payload.name} (${payload.email}).`,
});
// 3. Wait for 7 days
await io.wait("wait-a-week", { days: 7 });
// 4. Schedule a follow-up check-in email
await io.sendEmail("send-follow-up", {
to: payload.email,
subject: "Checking in on your first week!",
// ...email body
});
return { success: true, userId: payload.userId };
},
});
// In your application backend (e.g., after user signup)
// you would trigger this Job like this:
async function triggerOnboarding(user: { id: string; email: string; name: string }) {
await client.sendEvent({
name: "user.created",
payload: {
userId: user.id,
email: user.email,
name: user.name,
plan: "premium",
},
});
}
Notice a few key things:
This is the essence of BaC in action: the onboarding logic is defined as a durable, testable Job, and trigger.do provides the simple, reliable mechanism to launch it.
The beauty of this model is its universal applicability. While user onboarding is a classic example, event-driven workflow automation can power nearly any business process:
By decoupling the "what" (the business logic) from the "when" (the trigger), you gain immense flexibility. You can Trigger Actions. Automate Anything.
Ready to stop wrestling with scattered scripts and start treating your business logic like the critical asset it is? trigger.do gives you the code-based workflow triggers to make Business as Code a reality.